Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 1979,11, 289-297. Essentially, the whole shebang can be boiled down to one thing that explains it all. It is the belief that we can understand the whole by understanding the parts. American Journal of Epidemiology, 1974,99, 235-249. Zubin, J., & Spring, B. Despite the considerable resources invested in it, pharmacological research devoid of an awareness of the psychological needs of the addict and his or her social setting has succeeded only in creating new drugs to which people may become addicted. Hide transcripts. ), Essays in social neuroscience (pp. While Freudian psychology has been the dominant single approach to psychotherapy in the 20th century, its appeal has been limited by the intensity of self-examination it requires as a part of treatment. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Limitations of current treatment and research on smoking: A discourse on the need to understand underlying mechanisms. Hysteroid dysphoria is characterized by repeated episodes of abruptly depressed mood in response to feeling rejected. For example, an article by neurologist Richard Restak (1977) inSaturday Review reports. The fourth session, in 1977, was given over to brain-behavior relationships and contained papers on several of the same topics presented at the first session, as well as on such topics of growing popularity as the physiology of consciousness and the lateral organization of the brain. One focuses on the conditioning of women toward personal relationships, particularly with men (Arieti & Bemporad, 1978). Psychologists advance theories of sex development. All continue to sustain themselvesand some even to growbut none can claim the centrality in psychology that is now reserved for biochemistry and neurology. Time, April 2, 1979, pp. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1970,15, 215-222. Cummings indicates that he considers alcoholism to fall within the category of those addictions that some people are genetically predisposed toward. Our confidence in those areas of physics used for spaceflight is strongly reinforced by moon landings and photographs of Venus and Saturn. ),Advances in experimental psychology(Vol. Some have tried to trace this difference in the sexes to biological differences such as hormones or X chromosomes. The addiction-prone individual would then be made neurologically identical to the individual who has superior resistance to addiction. Our faith that a malady exists at a given level affects how we respond to it. They may, however, continue to welcome a treatment that removes their feelings of depression without giving them the ability to modify the social and personal factors that contribute to these feelings. Instead of reformulating the addiction concept to account for their data, Morgan ignores the implications of his evidence that addiction can take place with a non-drug-related activity like running, and Cummings dismisses his own clinical experience that addiction is best dealt with in the absence of a priori physiological assumptions. For others it is congenital and in utero (pp. Proponents of the more sophisticated reductionist arguments outlined in the previous section may expect to find that helplessness or other learned response tendencies have explicit correlates in the nervous system. In this essay the idea of reductionism will be analysed through psychological . Cummingss allegiance to models that his treatment of addiction proves to be useless is thus a violation of the canons of science. One of the first issues in the eighties of the modish magazineNew Yorkfeatures on its cover an article called Medicine for the Eighties: Better Living Through Chemistry (1980), which lists 17 drugs to keep you happy, healthy, and sane. These include an endogenous peptide that can serve as the prototype for a generation of safe, natural sleeping pills; a hormone that overcomes psychological impotence; an endorphin painkiller 200 times more powerful than morphine, [yet] nonaddictive; norepinephrine and serotonin to eliminate aggression; a peptide that may one day cure obesity; peptides that heighten powers of concentration; a hormone that stimulates memory, lost, for example, in an alcoholic blackout; a drug that blocks the brain receptors which produce fear symptoms and can thus stop such things as stage fright; and so on. (p. 7). (Eds. 1 views. The woman invested a relationship with a man she knew briefly with tremendous emotional significance. At the present time, however, when the claims made for reductionist explanations have become so all-encompassing, it is important to express a contrary position, namely, that some problems may only be meaningfully analyzed at a social or a psychological level. Whether or not patients participate in psychodynamic therapy as well, undoubtedly some of those treated with drugs are not able to change the cyclic and unsatisfying nature of their intimate relationships. In particular, instances have been publicized in which prominent people have become addicted to Valium and other sedatives or tranquilizers that were prescribed to them by doctors (see Gordon, 1979). 1-2. The basic question of reduction is whether the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from one scientific domain (typically at higher levels of organization) can be deduced from or Reductionists say that the best way to understand why we behave as we do is to look closely at the very simplest parts that make up our systems, and use the simplest explanations to understand how they work. Pomerleau. Compare with: emergentism. It is more of a philosophy or a faith in the ultimate nature of things. For example, a meta-analysis of 14 . In its place, they devised their own form of therapy for autism. Today one of the most damning criticisms against a particular psychological analysis is that it blames the victim.. Physician and Sportsmedicine, 1979,7(2), 55-70. 0. especially of a romantic nature, to which they respond with elevation of mood and energy. This society is vaguely hinted to have been brought about through political repression. 61-67. The reductionist perspective can be very useful, and nevertheless it entails a danger to be taken into account: it can generate circular explanatory frameworks when trying to give an understanding of what happens in a complex and changing phenomenon, as we will see. Pomerleau, O., Pertschuk, M., & Stinnett, J. Since the turn of the century, American pharmacology has sought drugs that can relieve pain (along with anxiety and tension) without being addictive (cf. New York, January 28, 1980, pp. During this time, we have witnessed the introduction of heroin (to replace morphine), barbiturates, synthetic narcotics such as Demerol and methadone, and nonbarbiturate sedatives. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23862-0_1, Palgrave Religion & Philosophy Collection. Is this more concise and understandable than a conception that rats find narcosis not to be desirable when it interferes with successful intraspecies competition and with the appeal of a diverse and welcome environment? When this occurs, psychology and psychiatry will be subsumed by the field Restak calls psychobiology. Ariew, R. (1976). Schachter, S. Pharmacological and psychological determinants of smoking.Annals of Internal Medicine, 1978,88,104-114. Social psychologists often oppose reductionism and emphasize instead the social context that surrounds the individual. Philosophy provides an epistemological and conceptual framework that we use to interpret and produce data, and that previous phase is not a scientific task; rather, it has to do with defending a point of view and arguing why it is better than other philosophical positions.if(typeof ez_ad_units != 'undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[728,90],'yestherapyhelps_com-box-3','ezslot_2',114,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-yestherapyhelps_com-box-3-0'); This is something that happens in all sciences, because all of them are based on philosophical foundations that normally have been discussed for decades. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969. Another level of misconception is introduced when psychologists not familiar with the complexities in fundamental theories rest their interpretations of psychological phenomena on their assumptions about these theories. School of Human and Health Sciences, The University of Huddersfield, UK, You can also search for this author in New York Times, November 13, 1979, Part 3, pp. Human Nature, July 1978, pp. Also writing forSaturday Review, Kety (1976) reports on his work in biological psychiatry in an article entitled Its Not All in Your Head. The subtitle states that there are now substantial indications that serious mental illnesses derive from chemical, rather than psychological, imbalances (p. 28). If you want to understand something, the reductionist approach would propose simply taking a look at each of its constituent pieces. In a section of his article entitled Physiologic Mechanisms of Running, Morgan (1979) employs indirect evidence to argue that running influences the central nervous system at a cellular level (p. 58). Let's see an example related to cognitive sciences and the study of the brain. It was therefore a significant research advance when government-sponsored investigations of drug use among soldiers in Vietnam led to the study of more representative populations of narcotics users. Washington, D.C.: V. H. Winston, 1974. Gordon, B.Im dancing as fast as I can. Both of these models emphasize that it is the sex role allocated to women in our society which leads them to be susceptible to depression. This reductionist trend of thought, as well as having major scientific implications, affects popular attitudes toward self-regulation in key areas of human functioning. Schachters and his students obesity research, in turn, grew out of Schachters hallmark study of the influence of cognitive and social factors in individual responses to drug-induced states (Schachter, 1964). Tips And Advice Of Psychologists. Kosterlitz, H. W. Endogenous opioid peptides and the control of pain.Psychological Medicine, 1979,9, 1-4. Kosterlitz, 1979), can thus be seen to take a place in the long line of such efforts that have proved futile. Recently, however, endorphin researchers like Goldstein (1976) have attempted to explain this inconsistency by suggesting that it is individuals whose bodies are deficient in endorphins who become addicted when they are exposed to a narcotic. One of the biggest problems in psychologys quest to understand the human being has been the tendency to fall back on reductionism as a means of explaining why human beings are like they are. For example, the characteristics of a complex phenomenon, such as the movements of an ant mob, arise from the sum of the individual behaviors of each of these insects. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1977,86, 103-126. Science, 1976,193, 1081-1086. Or does a genetic predisposition exist toward all addictions simultaneously, since Cummings indicates that the same addictively predisposed individual can become addicted to practically anything? In some cases, holism in psychology can be very useful for example in humanistic/social/abnormal psychology, psychoanalysis, and perception (where the brain "understands an interprets sensory information" (Simply Psychology)). Part of Springer Nature. Greenfeld notes that psychodynamic theories have not led to demonstrably effective treatment and that what is called autism actually represents a variety of childhood syndromes. The first session, in 1974, dealt with physiological determinants of behavior and included papers on biochemistry and schizophrenia, the biological basis of memory, behavior genetics, and brain functioning and human behavior. Reduction A doctrine to which most philosophers of science subscribe (and to which I subscribed for many years) is the doctrine that the laws of suJh `higher-level' sciences as psychology and sociology are reducible to the laws of lower-level sciences - biology, chemistry, ultimately to the laws of elementary particle . How to identify the biological processes on which the intelligence of each person exists? Garmezy, N.Vulnerable and invulnerable children: Theory, research, and intervention. New York Times, April 10, 1979, Part 3, pp. A means of identifying a particular phenomenon by declaring that, once adequately comprehended, it can be demonstrated to be a different phenomenon, wherein the secondary phenomenon appears to be less complicated, more fundamental, or more elementary. Being such a complicated task, many researchers opted to analyze patterns of activation of specific parts of the brain and compare the combination of these parts of the nervous system with the scores that each person gets in an intelligence test. Intelligence is such an interesting and popular as controversial concept, since there is no very clear and exhaustive definition of what is or is not. Once welcomed as widely as antidepressants are today, tranquilizers have now been identified as the objects of considerable abuseso much so that medical and scientific bodies have recommended major corrections to what have become standard practices for prescribing these substances. Blau (1977), in his presidential address to APA, indicated that after 16 years of clinical practice with children, he has found that schizophrenia and other problems his young patients evince are related to their tendency to draw circles with a clockwise motiona tendency he traces to brain functioning and genetic factors. The research of Kety and others is also given popular expression in an article entitled From Joy to Depression: New Insights Into the Chemistry of Moods, which appeared in theNew York Times Magazine(Scarf, 1977). Schachter, S. The interaction of cognitive and phvsiological determinants of emotional state. The concept behind phrenologythat specific areas of the brain correspond to the various components in a persons characterfinds a strong parallel in the concept underlying modern psychosurgery. On these choice days, the isolated rats drank far more morphine solution than did the social rats (p<.001)so much so that there was virtually no overlap between the populations. PubMedGoogle Scholar, Hayes, N. (1995). By making this adjustment in thinking, it becomes possible to propose that under stressful circumstances the organism requires a higher endorphin level and will thus be susceptible to narcotic addiction as an artificial way of attaining this level. This occurs, in part, because of the popularity of a philosophical position known as reductionism . American Psychologist, 1979,34, 1119-1129. 31-36. - 5.196.112.150. Similarly, McClelland et al.s (1972) model of alcohol intoxication as the fulfillment of otherwise unsatisfied needs for power succeeds in accounting for both problem drinking in our society and cross-cultural differences in alcoholism. Alexander, B. K., Coambs, R. B., & Hadaway, P. F. The effect of housing and gender on morphine self-administration in rats. Reductionism is the point of view that human behavior can successfully be resolved into its biological components, components that may then in turn be described as chemical and electrical events. Spitzer, B. L., & Endicott, J. . In some cultures in which problem drinking is practically unknown (such as rural Mediterranean societies), drinking does not lead to the destructive disinhibition and antisocial behavior (such as fighting, reckless driving, blackout, sexual aggression) that in fact define alcoholism in our culture (Blum & Blum, 1969). While the first criterion in evaluating a scientific model is its accuracy in describing a phenomenon and the factors that lead to and surround it, an additional criterion is parsimony. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); REDUCTIONISM: "Reductionism strives to prove that psychological processes are simply a product of biological functions. It is based on the idea that all phenomena can be reduced into smaller aspects, including your. Four days when both water and solution were available were scattered throughout this period, and a choice was also given on several occasions following the period of habituation. At the time this work stood out against the notion that chemical and physiological inputs are universal and inflexible determinants of mood and behavior. A reductionist attitude blinds the observer to the existence of emergent properties. Gross, M. L.The psychological society. [any] proposed definition and criteria for medical and mental disorder is simply that it is useful (Spitzer & Endicott, 1978, p. 37). The Goldstein hypothesis continues to account for addiction with essentially one factor. There is no right or wrong answer, but both approaches have different assumptions, and psychologists, researchers and students need to be aware of . ),The pharmacological basis of therapeutics(5th ed.). Unable to display preview. Peele, S.Addiction: The analgesic experience. Pomerleaus summary of the evidence on the disease concept stands as among the strongest and most reasonable refutations of that idea (Pomerleau, Pertschuk, & Stinnett, 1976). In this period, the German authorities declared that the only legitimate research for the alienist was pathological anatomy of the nervous system (Bromberg, 1975, p. 133), and autopsies of the insane were widely carried out in the United States as well as in Germany. Is based on the basis of therapeutics ( 5th ed. ) political repression imaginary she Is psychology reductionist and is not itself a theory, since it does not present testable hypotheses tend Content-Sharing initiative, Over 10 million scientific documents at your fingertips, not logged in -.! 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